Hi GNURadio fellows,
considering that this list has grown to something highly relevant in Software Defined Radio I thought it would have been a good idea to share here a few thoughts I've been having since long and as well as a result that was just achieved.
Since a few months after my first approach to SDR in 2006,
I thought I picked up two major facts about the technology:
.:. SDR infinite potential lying for sure in its flexibility but, even more relevantly, in its ability to bypass
the costly HW-level design stage which is embedded in any traditional radio design/production process
.:. Its equally infinite power-inefficiency compared to traditional, HW-implemented competitor technologies.
In fact, ease of development as well as flexibility appear to be inversely proportional to power efficiency.
The latter being in my opinion the reason for which SDR has been growing for ages up to now but has never "exploded" as we could expect from a technology cutting away a conspicuous part of the design costs of any radio system.
Actually, flexibility and cost-efficiency, though considerable, do not appear to be sufficient motivation for accepting to upscale power requirements (at a given computational cost yielded by the implemented wireless standard) by a factor which typically is in [100 ; 300].
Whether right or wrong, by working with these thoughts in mind, during the research I'm carrying on at the University of Pisa, Italy while doing my PhD here, I developed a novel implementation technique targeted at software-implemented Signal Processing over General Purpose CPUs or DSPs which we (at DSPCoLa lab,
http://dspcola.iet.unipi.it ) call "MA".
Current research results have shown that MA was able to increase by slightly more than one order of magnitude the power efficiency of a traditionally implemented (MA-free) SDR.
By applying such "MA" technology to the ETSI DVB-T receiver chain with the help of:
Mario Di Dio (former master thesis student, now PhD Student at DSPCoLa)
Luca ROSE (former master thesis student at DSPCoLa, now PhD student at Supélec Paris)
we obtained the receiving companion of Soft-DVB: SR-DVB.
Standing for Software Receiver - DVB,
SR-DVB is a fully software (all signal processing is done in pure C++ over the host computer) ETSI DVB-T receiver capable of running realtime
while providing 11.612 Mbps throughput
and absorbing less than 50% of computational resources available over an Intel Q9400, 2.66 GHz CPU.
As long as MA was applied only to the two computationally-heaviest blocks of the receive chain (i.e. Viterbi Decoding and OFDM synch), we believe that considerable margins for improvement of the presented result do exist. They will be explored in the next months.
SR-DVB will be presented in Karlsruhe at WSR 10
as the article:
"A Fully Software ETSI DVB-T Receiver Based on the USRP"
during such presentation also MA technology will be briefly outlined.
A demo video of our proof-of-concept receiver is available at
as usual, mplayer or VLC wil play this camcorder mpeg2 viedo easily.
Best regards to all writers and readers of the list
vincenzo
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Vincenzo Pellegrini